In early April 2020, Australia’s Tier 1 supercomputing facilities, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre (Pawsey) and the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), joined forces to offer additional computation and data resources to support the national and international research community to acquire, process, analyse, store and share data supporting COVID-19 research. Both facilities contributed extensive resources to assist researchers in the fight to overcome COVID-19. Through this initiative, researchers throughout Australia are now working with NCI which is currently supporting three targeted projects with more than 40 million units of compute time on the Gadi supercomputer; and Pawsey Supercomputer Centre, which provides access across five projects to over 1100 cores on the newly deployed Nimbus cloud and Topaz.
On July 31st, five researchers came together on Zoom to show over 70 attendees how they are using these facilities to understand the lineage of the SARS-COV-2 coronavirus while making statistical inferences about potential treatment outcomes, molecular modelling and more. Thanks goes out to the researchers who showcased their work during this event:
- Dr Gareth Price, Head of Computational Biology at QCIF Facility for Advanced Bioinformatics
- A/Prof Megan O'Mara at Australian National University
- Dr Tom Karagiannis at Monash University
- A/Prof Michael Wise at the University of Western Australia
- Shelley Barfoot at the University of Queensland
